Back in May, a Square Enix recruitment listing revealed the company to be in development with a new next generation engine. The listing caused quite a bit of fuss, in part because it used Cloud Strife's eyes as a key visual.

The identity of the engine has at long last come to light. As reported today at Famitsu.com, Square Enix's Yoshihisa Hashimoto closed off a session at the CESA Developers Conference (CEDEC) event in Yokohama today by providing first details about the new engine, named "Luminous" (in Japanese, "ルミナス").

Hashimoto is producer and technical director on the project. He was joined by the project's lead programmer, Hiroshi Iwasaki. The announcement came at the end of a session discussing the "G2 Engine" and "CDC Engine," which were utilized in the latest Eidos games like Deus Ex and Kane and Lynch.

According to Hashimoto, the goal of Luminous is to create "a game engine that can truly take on the world head on." The engine will incorporate all the old Eidos technology that had been introduced earlier in the session, he said.

Slides shown at the event mentioned that the engine will be a general purpose game development environment for achieving both high efficiency and high quality. Bullet points listed on the slides included (most of these are translated from Japanese): "Visual Editing," "Live Editing," "Concurrent Editing," "Automatic Build and Automatic Test," "Online Friendly," "Asset Management Functionality," "Advanced Rendering," "Task Management," "Simple," "Cross Platform," "General Purpose," "Modularity" and "Scalability."

As for when we'll get to see the fruits of the Luminous team's work, Hashimoto said this won't be too far off. At the latest, we can expect a followup report within two years.

You can get a look at the team that's working on Square Enix's next generation technology in this slide (I believe they're standing outside the Square Enix headquarters in Shinjuku).